Dusty

Sometimes it can be fun to play with lost memories. I know that I did recently use a paintbrush to clean my screen. It's all dusty again, and I'm too smart to wipe it off which just makes permanent smudges and little scratches.

I know that it was mine, and what it looked like and I can remember placing it back into its cellophane wrapper after shaking clean the dust, but I can't remember when or where I must have been since there is no place around this apartment now where I would put a paintbrush. It must have been at my sister's house. It must have been a paintbrush I'd left there. I try not to touch the screen and smudge it and make it something less than pristine.

Dust gathers in all the most annoying places, and I can hardly imagine someone having the patience really to disassemble furniture and displace wall hangings and get at all the dust. Although it is only the existence of vacuum cleaners which makes even the attempt seem possible or worth essaying. And then you have to clean the filter, which I did already, before turning on the heat for the first time of the season because I don't really want to stir up dust until I clean. But cleaning out the vacuum cleaner is itself such a dirty business.

Still, there are times when I do enjoy tinkering with my thoughts, and chasing down memories and sometimes I do have the energy to get into all the crevices because I need to get my mind off something else, or am looking forward to the enjoyment after. But it never helps to make it an onerous chore, flecked with guilt, and so the dust mostly gathers. My mind grows old.

I cling to my subjectivity. Who among us would toss that away so carelessly as a song, and not regret in anticipation the moment after it all was just too late? Sure, if it were our child whose life we'd save, or maybe if there were some kind of wholesale emergency and everyone was dying and no way out. Perhaps then we'd throw ourselves in front of some bullet or onto some grenade if it seemed as though there were any hope left at all. Perhaps if there were some massive epidemic, we'd let go of our individual fear. Bad luck for all and some would live.

Screen projections of needless death are so sad. Projections of ourselves. Still, once towers of such complexity get built that their collapse is more likely than their staying erect, who shall you blame for their tumbling down? Must it be somebody's fault? Must there be an error at the root of every conflagration or might it be that we just weren't trying hard enough?

What is modernity but the collapse of subjectivity into the illusion of control and so if it does arrive before it's time, then death is always unjustified and terror permanent, until such time as there is no purchase of love any longer and the dust returns? Why do we not try our hardest at every single task before us? Why is that regret not so great? What about a college application or a job application? What if the game is rigged and trying hard isn't going to get it for you anyhow?

What is after this modern phase but waking up to the illusion of control and yet and still we don't do so quietly. Something not quite random would be nice, although it would be nice to win the lottery too. The intentional fallacy is what happens when you invest your talent with that of you that you would like to be proud of, but what is left but for verisimiltude to what you're not, or what you would have been without any you at all to it, but raw talent raw mimesis, clean of any dust.

Is there really anything at all to love in the very best among us, or do they just belong to the ages, to the recording media to something not quite perfected not quite clean but superficially so, airbrushed, who among us can resist tumbling into bed with a willing quarry?

And so what is there to hold onto except money honey? At least that can be counted. At least that counts. What is there to regret more than mis-spent or wasted money, and even rich people seem to have to invest something more like emotion in the money that counts, at least to the giving it away if not to the hoarding of it, or the calculating of the best values. It would not be fair if you didn't have to work for yours!

When you have a lot of it you can seem important to everyone who knows that you have lots of it, but do you feel safe? Isn't there a different kind of terror that maybe you're an asshole and that no-one would love you no matter how much money you might have?

Well, the memory goes anyhow, and so it might be worth investing some derring-do in something better than just to survive, just to make money, just to be clean or beautiful or even healthy.

The memory goes and with it the subjectivity and with that any claim to knowledge that isn't common. Although the common kind can make us feel secure.

A Ghost Drive-by Along a Ghostly Walk

It’s been suggested that I might be good at leading ghost walks. Passive voice. I’m intrigued. I tag along for a walk right near my own neighborhood as conducted by a practiced expert. I want to witness what these walks are all about. He’s good at keeping it light, my guide, since the skin may crawl on its own without any guidance once the creepy facts are assembled. I’m skeptical of ghosts, naturally, and am trying to imagine how I could fit my own voice into this act. What could my role be? Pith helmet among the gullibles?

Early on, the walk stops at my friends’ former house, and so I’m on alert. I’d spent a lot of time there. I’d been involved in the start of a project to rebuild its carriage house. I’ll have evidence to contradict any stories that are told, which just makes me nervous for our host. Something about a brassiere factory, a fire and a bicycle museum, and a little girl ghost and I recognize what must be the son of my friends as the temporary pyromaniac the guide spoke of, but that just doesn’t ring true.

The very next day I head out with that same good lifelong friend to scour the junkyards – graveyards for cars – for seats which might fit the “kit-car” we’ve been working on, absurdly, for many months now. We’d sat alongside it on the Elmwood Avenue “cruise night” among the perfectly buffed and polished notables brought back to life from the grand old days of automobiles.

This “Bradley GT” cartoon fiberglass sports car on a VW Beetle chassis got attention just for its comic relief, but we hadn’t even had a chance to wash it, nevermind bringing it up to show quality. I’ll just bet the reason that it didn’t show up in the News’ spread of pictures from the show is that it turned up as a blurry aura when their photographer culled his shots.

I told my good friend I had a bone to pick with him, speaking of graveyards in his basements where another motor project hangs like a side of beef now. How come he’d never told me about the ghost? He knew that I was attending these workshops for folks who write about the so-called paranormal.

Well, matter of fact, he said, that house was indeed haunted. They didn’t move in as believers, but when a Pyrex dish jumped off its shelf and exploded on the floor of the walk-in pantry my friend’s wife’s Mom (I’m keeping my distance here) commented that the ghost didn’t like the pantry door being shut, and all the fun in the kitchen.

There was one of a pair of Christmas candles which simply wouldn’t stay in its base overnight, and it was placed, not tipped, onto its side come morning. There were ketchup bottles cleaned up from among the debris left by the troublesome tenant downstairs who’d had to be evicted, arranged neatly on the windowsill and then rearranged overnight to different places without any breakage. And then there was the plaster plaque propped in plain sight in the attic - where nothing had ever been seen before - of a man’s bust and the caption “R. Robert Wagner,” as best my friends still remember.

They called the ghost “Wagner,” and got along with it fine. Their infant son would talk to it, and track it with his eyes – not the pyromaniac from the ghost walk story who must have moved in afterwards according to the dateline we reconstructed. A church organist was murdered across the street while my friends’ house was being painted; right as the painters were eating lunch and looking toward that house. They were aware of nothing.

Yes, I have corrections for the ghost walk, as well as new information. The brassiere factory was in the carriage house not next door in the bike “museum”– my friends called it a sweat shop and when we started rebuilding this carriage house - which remains disheveled but undisturbed until this day - they found piles of advertising brochures hidden in its walls when they pulled them open. I have a vague memory of that.

The bicycle so-called museum might have been the home of a bicycle club, back when bicycles were the rage and they had six day races. They shoot horses, don’t they? We are so much more humane these days, our sweatshops are moved offshore and our champions wear armor. Our ghosts are mostly banished.

I learned on the walk that most ghost sightings are of young girls, and that the second most common are women in white. I learned of the sacred dimensions of certain kinds of architecture; dimensions which just simply look haunted to the rest of us not initiated in ghost lore.

My friends moved from that house to a larger one which used to be a brothel! But no ghosts there, although the place looked as though there should be. You know, hotels, brothels, theaters, nunneries, these are places where ghosts hold forth. Makes sense. But not everybody sees them, and I confirm that my friends aren’t all that excitable.

I imagine the spin that I would give if I were to lead the walks. That of course the imagination will lead us to look in certain places, and that these places by their lore, by their sightlines, by their feng-shui in relation to all around them will be the places where energies will coalesce and it will be difficult to distinguish the real from the merely imagined.

Now I don’t maintain that there is a stark distinction between the real and the maybe – looking forward, what separates our aspirations from reality is but a thin slice of will and determination. Plus so much luck and family conditioning and bodily endurance. Looking backwards in time then, when is the moment when a person becomes not one? If strong emotions are involved, and if there is influence beyond the skin’s boundary of real touch, can it all really hinge on a heartbeat? Do you really end where your skin does? Are boundaries ever clear, or are there only intervals and jumps? How small do things have to get before you hit quantum reality, Zeno?

So I spent the better part of yesterday buffing up that old kit car. There were some stains which simply would not come out, and others which would. Some rust is permanent and some is amenable to steel wool. They treated me to dinner out with the entire extended family, my friends did, as reward for the car’s transformation. But then I spirited home right after dinner along with the mother-in-law since I’m not indulging sprits these days, ahem, and they all wanted to head out for a night on the town.

Walking from theirs to my home alone along Elmwood a pristine white Bradley GT drove by, no kidding! (My daughter chides me for using feminine adjectives to describe the car over the phone as I was picking away at its blemishes) I called Pat and told him I could not have been more amazed had I seen a ghost. And hell, even if there is another of these cars in our vicinity, which I frankly doubt, why would it drive by me at just that moment?

Just keeping it light here. No need to make the skin crawl. So, yeah, I’ve never seen a ghost. That beauty in white was real, and I’m certain of it.